This is an easy way to obtain a lot of trillium (and living steel).

On a gatherer, set your hearthstone to your faction’s Pandaria capital city.

Fly around and gather (gathering resets the nodes in the area) until you find a golden lotus node. Harvest – note the buff it gives you! For 15 minutes, anything you kill has a chance to drop a treasure chest, which has a high chance of containing ghost iron, black/white trillium and spirits of harmony.

Head to Loremasters and queue for LFR. Clear trash up to first boss. Leave raid, reset, rinse and repeat. The large packs mean you will get tons of treasure chests.

Smelt trillium and ghost iron, send that + spirits of harmony to your alchemist with transmute spec (for extra procs). Turn ghost iron into trillium, turn trillium + SoH into living steel using riddle of steel (or do this every now and then and always have a nice stockpile for daily transmute).

This is infinitely repeatable as long as you don’t kill any bosses in HoF – with LFR, you will hit a limit of number of times you can enter. The biggest bottleneck is finding golden lotus nodes. Augment it with the Halfhill farm for easy daily trillium and/or SoH. I usually do a lap after doing my farm – the monkey village, bamboo forest west of halfhill and Kun Lai summit are all node rich and this path will let you get a kill in on Sha of Fear as well as some rare kills. You’ll also get a ton of lesser charms which you can convert into bonus rolls.

Bonus optimisation options:

– Darkmoon fire-water for increased gathering speed
– Pandaria herb gathering speed bonus gloves (chance to drop from rares). I am pretty sure this stacks with fire-water, but haven’t properly tested, I just know it’s hella fast with both. Edit: these do NOT stack
– Mist-veiled goggles (MoP engineering craft) to see extra nodes
– Ancient Pandaren mining pick (from Jade forest mine) for free gems when hitting ore nodes (unsure if this is still obtainable)
– +speed gear set + bear tartare + druid for movement speed to make trash farming faster

If you just want ghost iron, head west of Shrine of Two Moons until you find the area where quillian spawn in an endless swarm. Kill them, mine them. You don’t need to move, just lay down aoe and mine. I prefer a paladin for this as consecration basically instakills everything running by.

Any other good tips?

Update Sept 2022:

– Make sure to harvest herbs as you go. Harvesting a herb clears it out so golden lotus can spawn – golden lotus has a random chance to appear when each node repopulates. DE-populating the nodes by harvesting them forces them to repopulate. If you don’t harvest, then you are just hunting for existing ones, which are much more rare.

– If you have multiple accounts, you can fly around together (eg vial of sands mount) and both harvest the nodes, which makes golden lotus spawn 2x, 3x (X = characters) as fast. Logging out preserves the buff!

– You can use LFR for trash. I don’t know if the raid/LFR is quicker.